m907

In my experience, Southwest's paid internet service only works about 60% of the time, and when it does, it's painfully slow.

However, I was on a full 737-700 today and the internet was noticeably faster and a speed test showed 10 Mbps. This is still far behind what the legacy carriers have now, but noticeably better than before. I remember the new CEO talked about better internet service being one of his priorities. Have they started upgrading things or was this just a fluke?

NoStressHere

I think the fiber optic cable that they drag behind the plane must have been a newer one with less damage - hence a better speed.

m907

I didn't realize that. It's not a fixed antenna, it's an actual cable dangling out of the plane?

smmrfld

Yes, kind of like the banners you see trailing old biplanes.

Tanic

Getting a bag of popcorn.

nsx

If that was a counter-troll, it's the best one I've seen in... possibly ever.

kennycrudup

Y'all funny- but as someone who gets it for free and uses it every time (and has a portable router so I get it on all my devices), it's totally hit-or-miss, and after hundreds of flights the only factor that I know for sure can cause bad speeds is cloud cover- but there's been times when it's been blue to the sun and it's just not very good- I'm figuring age/last calibration/number of users/... must play a part, as there's times I'll get ~1.5Mbyte/sec (and have been at times for years) and then there's times I'll get a few bits at a time. What's amazing in the times the IP service is bad I'll switch to TV, and that works perfectly- but I don't know if that's downlinked from DishNetwork on the plane, or IP from the sats.

I do feel for the folks who pay $8 for a bad experience though.

djp98374

factors are

age/ quality of equipment
weather
users count
what users are doing
connection type

NoStressHere

And one more.

Murphy's law. The more you NEED to have a connection, the odds against you go up!

fiuchris

Just a clarification on the weather piece - it's much less to do with the weather between airplane and satellite, and much more to do with weather at the ground stations that are actually sending "the internet" up to the satellite to relay to the airplane.

kennycrudup

Oh yeah, forgot about that. I remember my DTV having outages in sunny SoCal 'cause there were storms near the uplink site in CO.

m907

https://simpleflying.com/southwest-a...gh-speed-wifi/

Maybe my plane had a kevlar-shielded fiber optic cable!